Veteran educator Ann Cronin offers her plan to assess real student achievement.
Skip the standardized tests and assess what students know and can do.
She shows how it can be done, saving every state and district millions now wasted on the testing industry.
Ed Johnson lives in Atlanta and fights daily against the malignant competition and punishment inflicted on the children of Atlanta by the school board and superintendent. He shares the philosophy of W. Edwards Deming, who taught the importance of collaboration and teamwork.
He wrote this post and sent it to the school board:
Ed Johnson
Advocate for Quality in Public Education
Atlanta GA | (404) 505-8176 | edwjohnson@aol.com
This is a wonderful article that appeared in Education Week, written by Margaret Pastor, a veteran educator in Maryland.
When I started reading, I recoiled at the thought of giving standardized tests to babies in kindergarten. Disgusting. But keep reading, as I did (if you are a subscriber).
Many of us in education have deep misgivings about the role standardized tests play in our schools. As a principal, I’ve had a front-row seat to incidents that illustrate why we should be seriously concerned. Let me tell you about one of them.
A few years ago, an assistant superintendent approached me about the performance of my kindergarten teachers. He had looked at the school’s scores from a commonly used standardized test and had identified an underperforming kindergarten teacher.
He pointed out that in one of my four kindergarten classes, the student scores were noticeably lower, while in another, the students were outperforming the other three classes. He recommended that I have the teacher whose class had scored much lower work directly with the teacher who seemed to know how to get higher scores from her students.
Seems reasonable, right? But here was the problem: The “underperforming” kindergarten teacher and the “high-performing” teacher were one and the same person.
I had just two kindergarten teachers. They each taught one morning and one afternoon class.
The idea that I should have the “high performing” teacher coach her lower-performing colleague was suddenly very concerning to me, not to mention impossible. It was clear to me that I couldn’t use standardized tests to distinguish high-performing from low-performing teachers. And this incident fed the doubts that I already harbored about using those same tests-which are meant to be “scientific”-to measure student learning.
I am married to a scientist. He runs tests on plant pathology, analyzes the results, draws conclusions, and uses the results to develop solutions to the problems he studies. I am in awe of the tidiness of the whole process.
I, on the other hand, am an educator. At best, every child is an experiment of one. We test the children’s learning with admittedly limited instruments-standardized tests-that were never designed to be used as a standalone analysis. A lot of classroom time is dedicated to preparing for these tests and giving them. Results are affected by dozens of variables that we can’t control: illness, hunger, sleep deprivation, unfamiliar forms of a test, limited command of English.
It gets better and better but I have quoted as much as I can.
The biggest battle in the fight against privatization has been to persuade the Democratic Party that it had been hoaxed by Republicans into adopting the Republican agenda. According to this article in The Washington Post, Democratic support for charter schools has evaporated, at least among the candidates.
The title of the article is “Democrats abandon charter schools as ‘reform’ agenda falls from favor.” No one has more egg on their faces than the editorial board of the Washington Post, which loves charter schools and defends them at every turn.
Until 1993, Democrats supported equity and federal funding for public schools, while Republicans supported choice, testing, competition, and accountability.
Then Bill Clinton embraced charter schools, testing, standards, and accountability. Then came NCLB and it was endorsed by Ted Kennedy and the entire Democratic Party.
Then the Obama Race to the Top gave total support to the Bush NCLB approach of charters, testing, and harsh accountability, and Arne Duncan spent seven years parroting the Republican line that the best way to improve schools was to get tough on teachers, make tests harder, and open more charter schools.
According to the Washington Post, the Democratic love affair with charters is over.
The steady drumbeat of scandals and the vivid advocacy of Betsy DeVos have killed the Democrats’ charter love.
Suddenly, the Democratic candidates for president seem to have realized that school choice is a Republican issue. Supporting the public schools that nearly 90% of all students attend is a Democratic issue.
This is awkward for Democrats like Governor Jared Polis of Governor and Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, all fans of charters.
Democrats have long backed charter schools as a politically safe way to give kids at low-performing schools more options. Many supported merit pay for the best teachers and holding schools accountable for test scores.
The presidential contest is proof that’s no longer the case.
If the candidates say anything about charter schools, it’s negative. Education initiatives boosted by the Bush and Obama administrations are nowhere to be found in candidate platforms.
Instead, the Democratic candidates are pitching billions of dollars in new federal spending for schools and higher pay for teachers, with few of the strings attached that marked the Obama-era approach to education.
It adds up to a sea change in Democratic thinking on education, back to a more traditional Democratic approach emphasizing funding for education and support for teachers and local schools. Mostly gone is the assumption that teachers and schools are not doing enough to serve low-performing children and that government must tighten requirements and impose consequences if results do not improve.
As a senator, Joe Biden said private school vouchers might help improve public schools. As vice president, he was atop an administration that made support for charter schools a requirement to access federal grant funding. But when asked about charters — privately run, publicly funded schools — during a recent forum with the American Federation of Teachers, Biden sounded a negative note.
“The bottom line is it siphons off money for our public schools, which are already in enough trouble,” he said….
Bernie Sanders thus far is the only candidate to call for an end to federal funding of charter schools. The safe position for Democrats is to oppose “for-profit” charters, while ignoring the fact that many “nonprofit charters” are operated by for-profit management corporations.
The story continues:
It’s an unsettling development for advocates of the structural changes that have fallen out of favor, and a sharp turn from where many Democrats were just a few years ago. Former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had pushed a bipartisan drive for accountability, and charter schools were the answer for Democrats who opposed private school vouchers but wanted to offer other options to children — often children of color from low-income families — assigned to low-performing schools. They were important to some civil rights leaders and became a central plank in the drive for school accountability….
The American Federation of Teachers has been hosting candidate forums throughout the country, inviting contenders to spend a day with teachers and then answering questions town hall-style.
At the town hall with Biden last month, AFT President Randi Weingarten was so warm and complimentary that it left some with the impression she was laying the groundwork for an endorsement.
“Vice President Joe Biden was our north star in the last administration,” she said. “We didn’t always get along with the Obama administration positions on education, but we had a go-to guy who always listened to us.” She added: “He’s with us because he is us.”
During the Obama administration, the National Education Association was so angry it called forEducation Secretary Arne Duncan to resign, and the other big teachers union, the AFT, came close…
The shift underway has Democrats who support charter schools and related policies nervous. Democrats for Education Reform is circulating results of a poll that show support for charter schools is higher among African American Democrats than whites. But overall, the poll found just 37 percent of Democratic primary voters have a favorable view of charters.
Some like-minded Democrats are working on something they call the Kids New Deal, hoping to find a candidate to support it. The centerpiece of the proposal is to make children a “protected class” under the law, which would make it easier for them to file lawsuits challenging, for instance, tenure for teachers, on the grounds that it hurts children.
“The goal here is to outflank the teachers unions from the left and not from the right,” said Ben Austin, a longtime education restructuring advocate.
DFER is the hedge fund managers group created to persuade Democrats to act like Republicans and support privatization. It offered big money for candidates who swallowed their line. DFER was condemned by the state Democratic Party in both California and Colorado as a front for Wall Street and corporate interests.
Ben Austin is one of California’s most aggressive charter school proponents, having run the faux Parent Revolution, whose goal was to convert public schools to charter schools. He spent millions of dollars from Gates, Waltons, and other billionaires, but converted only one or two public schools. If he is behind the “Kids New Deal,”’it is probably another billionaire-funded privatization vehicle.
The great news in this article is that those who have warned Democrats to return to their roots and stop acting like Republicans have won the debate.
Alfie Kohn has written many books critical of competition and ranking in schools. This article appeared in the New York Times.
For a generation now, school reform has meant top-down mandates for what students must be taught, enforced by high-stakes standardized tests and justified by macho rhetoric — “rigor,” “raising the bar,” “tougher standards.”
Here’s a thought experiment. Suppose that next year virtually every student passed the tests. What would the reaction be from politicians, businesspeople, the media? Would these people shake their heads in admiration and say, “Damn, those teachers must be good!”?
Of course not. Such remarkable success would be cited as evidence that the tests were too easy. In the real world, when scores have improved sharply, this has indeed been the reaction. For example, when results on New York’s math exam rose in 2009, the chancellor of the state’s Board of Regents said, “What today’s scores tell me is not that we should be celebrating,” but instead “that New York State needs to raise its standards.”
The inescapable, and deeply disturbing, implication is that “high standards” really means “standards that all students will never be able to meet.” If everyone did meet them, the standards would just be ratcheted up again — as high as necessary to ensure that some students failed.
The standards-and-accountability movement is not about leaving no child behind. To the contrary, it is an elaborate sorting device, intended to separate wheat from chaff. The fact that students of color, students from low-income families and students whose first language isn’t English are disproportionately defined as chaff makes the whole enterprise even more insidious.
But my little thought experiment uncovers a truth that extends well beyond what has been done to our schools in the name of “raising the bar.” We have been taught to respond with suspicion whenever all members of any group are successful. That’s true even when we have no reason to believe that corners have been cut. In America, excellence is regarded as a scarce commodity. Success doesn’t count unless it is attained by only a few.
One way to ensure this outcome is to evaluate people (or schools, or companies, or countries) relative to one another. That way, even if everyone has done quite well, or improved over time, half will always fall below the median — and look like failures.
Kohn quite rightly concludes that the nature of the standards-and-accountability regime of federal policy (No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Every Student Succeeds Act) requires that most children are left behind, most children will never reach the top, and most children will not succeed. The reliance on standardized testing, normed on a bell curve, guarantees that outcome.
Ann Cronin is an educator in Connecticut.
In this post, she explains what real achievement is, and it has nothing to do with test scores.
There are all kinds of suggestions for improving student achievement – privatize public schools, increase the number of standardized tests that students take, implement national standards, and enforce no-excuses classroom discipline. None of these practices, however, have made a bit of difference. That is for two reasons. One reason is that the underlying causes of poverty and racial injustice have gone unaddressed, and the other reason is that standardized test scores can never measure achievement and, instead, reliably indicate only one thing: the income of the parents of the test taker.
So the first step in increasing student achievement is to redefine what we mean by achievement. I recently witnessed something that crystallized for me what real achievement is.
She recently attended a ceremony in her community where high school seniors and adults were honored for community service.
When it was time for the second adult recipient, Roseanne Sapula, to give her speech, she spoke about how honored she was to receive the award she regarded as prestigious and how she had tried to write a speech but gave up. It was clear that she gave up because her volunteer work with the Monday Night Social Group, a group comprised of 40 special needs individuals of high school age and older, was so close to her heart that it was hard for her to explain her interactions with those in the group in a short speech. She did tell the audience that thinking up new adventures for those young adults and new ways for them to be part of the larger community was her “calling”.
As Roseanne was talking, she looked out in the audience and spotted one of the members of the Monday Night Social Group, Jacob, Fialkoff, a 20 year-old whom I later learned has cerebral palsy and a seizure disorder. She called out to him and asked him a favor. She explained to the audience that Jacob is scheduled to sing the National Anthem at the opening of the Connecticut Special Olympics and that he has a beautiful voice. She asked Jacob if he would sing it right there for all of us.
Jacob hesitated, probably feeling unprepared and that it was too much of a challenge at that moment. Roseanne, aware of his hesitation, asked him again, telling him that she would not be at the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics and would love to hear him sing the National Anthem. He still hesitated. Roseanne then asked him if he could do it just for her. He softly said OK.
He sang beautifully.
Jacob’s singing the National Anthem, unrehearsed and on the spot out of love for the person who asked him, is what is missing in the conversation about increasing student achievement, which has been the illusive national goal since the passing of “No Child Left Behind” in 2001. We have tested and prepared kids for tests. And achievement doesn’t budge. We have declared that urban schools are “failing schools” and opened charter schools. And achievement doesn’t budge. We have put in place Common Core standards. And achievement doesn’t budge. We suspend and expel students at high rates, particularly in charter schools. And achievement doesn’t budge. That’s because we have been looking in the wrong places for achievement. We have been looking at standardized tests.
What a narrow definition of achievement has ruled our nation since 2001, and even earlier.
Mercedes Schneider was a little surprised that Bill Gates is setting up a lobbying organization. Why should he? He has been shelling out millions to buy Influence with state and federal policy makers for years.
She writes:
Whereas the idea of Gates paying individuals to lobby to alter policy in line with his billionaire preferences, the public should realize that Gates already has an oversized influence on legislators and other elected and appointed officials.
For example, from 2002 to 2018, the Gates Foundation has paid the National Governors Association (NGA) $33.2M for Gates-approved initiatives, mostly affecting K12 education.
Shall we pretend that Gates’ steadily funding an association of state governors to promote Gates goals does not sway these governors? I think not.
From 2002 to 2018, Gates has also paid $122M to the state education superintendent organization, Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) on his K12 education preferences.
Both NGA and CCSSO were key organizations in promoting Common Core (see here and here, for example). Common Core is a Gates pet; he has been shelling out his billionaire bucks on it for years, even trying to tie it to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).
Gates has even paid grants to the US Department of Education: $858M (2013 – 2016). Wrap your mind around that one.
But there’s more.
From 2013 to 2016, Gates paid $1.8M to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The largest grant ($1.2M in 2015) was “to support education of state policymakers.”
In 2009, Gates stood before them and, as National Conference for State Legislatures “co-chair,” he told them what he wanted, as excerpted below from my March 20, 2014 post, which also references my March 17, 2014, post about Gates dining with 80 senators:
On March 13, 2014, Bill Gates had dinner with 80 senators and other elected officials. Given his keynote the following day to members of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), make no mistake that Gates used his time with the senators and other officials to push the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
However, Gates is more than CCSS. Gates is the entire spectrum of reforms, and he is more than willing to use his influence to promote his opinion of educational reform to those supposedly elected By the People.
The following text is an excerpt from Gates’ 2009, speech to the National Council of State Legislatures, which“co-chair” Gates offered as part of his complete speech on so-called education reform.
The entire speech is worth a sobering read.
Mercedes links to the Gates’ speech and quotes it.
Please open the link and read what he said in 2009.
Ten years later we know that every Gates Initiative in education has failed.
Testing, measuring teachers by test scores, closing public schools and replacing them with charters, Common Core, data-driven everything.
Do you think he knows it?
Mr. and Mrs. Bill Gates apparently feel they are not winning enough battles in the court of public opinion, so they have created a lobbying organization to promote their ideas in Congress and state legislatures.
Will the Gates lobby push for Common Core? For more high-stakes testing? For more federal funding for charter schools? For evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students? For more technology in the classroom?
These are but a few of Bill Gates’ failed education initiatives. Has he learned from failure or will he use his C4 lobby to push his failed ideas even more?
Bill and Melinda Gates have launched a lobbying organization to advocate for issues in health, education, and poverty, The Hill reported on Thursday.
The Gates Policy Initiative, which was announced on Thursday, will work with lawmakers on issues such as global health, global development, moving people from poverty to employment, and education for black, Latino, and rural students. The initiative, which will be a 501(c)(4) organization under the US tax code, is independent from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the billionaire couple’s philanthropic organization.
Rob Nabors, the director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the former White House director of legislative affairs during the Obama administration, told The Hill that the Gates Policy Initiative would work in a bipartisan way.
In an article in The Hill, Rob Nabors said the new lobbying organization would reflect the work of the foundation.
Much of what they’ve learned running their foundation will help them through the process of establishing a lobbying shop.
“Probably the most important point for us is similar to the way Bill and Melinda have approached their philanthropic giving and other things that they do. They are interested in learning what works and what doesn’t work,” Nabors said.
He said that if they are not successful in a couple of years, they will “shutter the shop and figure out what else could potentially be done.”
“I think that experimental type of approach, that innovative type of approach, is both relatively unique in this space and embedded into the DNA that Bill and Melinda bring with them,” he said.
Nabors said that when he worked in the Obama White House, his job was often described as the White House chief lobbyist.
“I’m excited to get back into the mix of talking to people specifically about the work that they are doing every day, trying to put bills together that will make people’s lives better,” he said.
He added that Bill and Melinda Gates also bring a unique lens to a lobbying shop.
“They are very data-focused so a number of the types of issues that we will be exploring and the solutions that we are exploring are based on data that we collected from programs that we funded,” he added.
Mercedes Schneider delved into the experience of Elizabeth Warren’s senior education advisor.
He entered teaching through Teach for America. I hear that his linked-in profile has been deleted since this post appeared but you might want to check to see if it has been restored.
I have met Elizabeth Warren twice, once in her Senate Office, about 2015, where we had a 30-minute conversation about education. I was greatly impressed by her quick intelligence. Earlier this year, I attended a house party in her honor at the home of a mutual friend in Manhattan and again was taken by her ideas about higher education, her passion, and her articulateness.
I was surprised and disappointed therefore to learn that her senior education advisor is TFA. TFA is a favorite of the Waltons, Eli Broad, and other billionaires who support privatization of public education. The Waltons have given many millions to TFA, at one point a single grant of $48 million; Broad assembled $100 million from a group of his allies for TFA. The organization supplies a large part of the workforce for private charter schools. Its leaders in high policy positions, like Michelle Rhee, John White, and Kevin Huffman have typically been pro-testing, anti-teacher, and anti-union.
I hope Warren clears the air by explaining where she stands on K-12 issues, whether she believes all children should have a credentialed teacher, whether she pledges to eliminate the federal Charter Schools Program (Betsy DeVos’ $440 Million Slush Fund), whether she supports the NAACP call for a moratorium on new charters, and whether she will actively fight to restore and protect teachers’ right to bargain collectively.
Yohuru Williams and Carol Burris assess the expressed views of the Democratic candidates—thus far—on K-12 education.
One hopes that the other candidates will soon state or clarify their views about privatization, testing, funding, and other important issues that the president can change.
They should all be asked at town halls whether they will kill the federal Charter Schools Program slush fund, which is now $440 million a year and is being used by DeVos to expand corporate chains.
Diane Ravitch's blog 